In January 2026, TikTok’s US operations were transferred to a new joint venture led by a consortium of American investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. This was no routine commercial transaction but a high-stakes political gambit, brokered by the Trump administration under the threat of banning TikTok entirely. The deal was justified primarily as a matter of national security and data privacy, but it also raises important questions about freedom of expression. The new joint venture assumes authority not only over data stewardship but also over content curation and moderation. Nor are the new owners disinterested financial institutions: they are politically active billionaires with close ties to the US Republican Party. What happens when a foreign platform is brought under the control of the US tech oligarchy? Building on my earlier work on platform ownership structures, this paper offers a detailed political-economic analysis of the TikTok USA deal and its implications for freedom of expression and media control. It reviews the political process leading to the deal, the corporate governance features of the new joint venture — including its relationship to ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company — and the political and economic profile of its new US owners. It argues that the deal represents significant innovations in corporate governance, which serve to reterritorialize control over platform content governance functions in the name of national digital sovereignty. Yet whereas TikTok USA’s present design recentralizes this control in the hands of the US tech oligarchy, the same principle of local divestment could also be leveraged to secure more democratically accountable ownership structures.